Once complete, the plan will include 32 strategic policy recommendations for the Cincinnati region in the areas of housing, transportation, land use, public facilities and services, natural systems and economic development.

The original plan was completed in 2005 but due to an evolving context in the wake of the Great Recession, and in the midst of significant demographic changes, the organization is updating the document.

OKI officials say that the planning process will address the same four questions as the original 2005 Plan: Where are we as a region? Where are we going given current trends? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

Specifically, the core and supplemental questions are looking to see where the 2.2-million-person region stands in terms of its preferences for various transportation, land use and economic development policies.

OKI, the region’s federally mandated metropolitan planning organization, has revised the 32 policy recommendations over the last year-and-a-half; and a draft is now ready for public viewing and comment.

It is hoped that the sleek, attractive and user-friendly website can be easily navigated by anyone interested in giving feedback. OKI is also utilizing a variety of social media tools to bolster participation, including several videos that have been uploaded to YouTube to help disseminate information and inspire people to get involved.

“We are focusing on presenting information in a more accessible way through the website,” said OKI planner Thomas DiBello, “People will be able to review the information whether they are at their computer or on a smartphone.”

This viewing format contrasts traditional multi-page documents that are increasingly being seen as dated ways to engage with a more tech-savvy public.. The website is interactive and input can be given with a series of clicks through short questionnaires.

In addition to standard questions, the online portal where those giving their feedback can also share their thoughts in more open-ended comments.

OKI officials say the comment period will remain open through the end of June. You can view the plan and give input through the How Do We Grow website. Those who prefer to read through the material on paper can do so by downloading the information from the website as well.

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“Objective
6.F. Transportation funding priority should be given to projects consistent with comprehensive plans that encourage the use of arterial and collector roadways for local trips.”

-Is this recommending that we create more stroads and less of a grid system?

http://www.UrbanCincy.com/ Randy A. Simes

Oddly enough, yes.

EDG

ODOT drives OKI’s Functional Classification which drives County and jurisdictional thoroughfare plans. The majority of local roads aren’t even included in these maps and some collectors are even left off. So then that hamstrings which projects are eligible for federal money and we end up building more limited access highways rather than interconnectivity.

Jonathan Hay

Have our vehicle miles really increased 33% from 200 to 2011? That runs counter to the rest of the country.

http://www.UrbanCincy.com/ Randy A. Simes

Technically yes, but there’s more to the story than that. For decades, VMT increased by about 2.5% annually. This trend stopped around 2007 when VMT started to level off and even decrease in many instances. Those decreases have not had enough time to put VMT at a lower level than where it was in 2000, but it will in the near future.

That is for overall VMT though. Per capita VMT, meanwhile, has fallen off a cliff. Check out our analysis on the topic from earlier this year: http://urbn.cc/p41u.

TimSchirmang

It is very difficult to get excited about this latest planning effort. The effort reveals the impossibility of the task itself, yet also represents a doubling down of sorts on the same old approach to urban regional planning. The time scale on which the planning discipline currently operates is simply too long to be productive. The breadth of the planning authority’s ambition most always correlates with the scope and scale of the planning process, and so correlates too with the unproductiveness of the process.

10 years ago OKI did this comprehensive plan and now there is an apparent need to comb through and update it to reflect the consequences of the recession. One would assume that the 2005 plan was a gem of public policy, but if the current proposed updates are any indication, an optimistic third grader could have penned most of the 32 ‘strategic policy recommendations’ (SPR’s).

For starters, SPR’s 1, 4, 8, 9, 12, 21, 25 and 26 are the same thing – too many local jurisdictions and not enough coordination between them. How much taxpayer money was spent duplicating this point 8 times?

The remaining SPR’s are an utterly obvious list of recommended utopian outcomes and suggestions built on comfortable verbs like ‘work with’ and ‘enable’ and ‘assess’.

What has all of this planning and planning how to plan and planning how to prepare to plan a plan get us??? With all the time and treasure spent planning a new Brent Spence bridge, I could have built one from toothpicks and elmer’s by now.

http://www.UrbanCincy.com/ Randy A. Simes

There is a lot packed into this comment. I think you make some valid points, but also go a bit too far in your critique of the planning profession. First off, not all of planning is on the same, long time-scale you bemoan here. Secondly, people like to know that they’re being included in the process that is spending their taxpayer dollars. Yes, this often includes spending taxpayer dollars in order to accomplish that, but that’s how our democracy works.

Where I take issue with the planning profession is when we do these outreach efforts, engage the public and then produce a list of policy recommendations or guiding principles that are never followed. If we’re going to take the time to ask people what they want and how they want things to move forward, then we might as well listen to what they have to say. If not, let’s just save everyone’s time and money and be honest that it’s ultimately just some director with a Blackberry clipped to their waist that is making the calls.

Matt Jacob

It’s pretty crazy that more people walk to work than go by transit in our region. This speaks pretty clearly to a lack of viable options.

Charles Ellison

Answers to the “how do we grow” question: (1) INWARD. (2) At the edges between areas of difference. (3) In a way that is attractive to strangers and outsiders. (4) In a way (bridges, anyone?) that maintains and even expands intercourse between OH and KY. (5) With no more stadiums on any riverfront. (6) With an Ohio River that is clean and safe and an airport that functions much closer to full utilization.

http://www.UrbanCincy.com/ Randy A. Simes

Did you find any of their questions to be a bit leading?

Charles Ellison

Where are we as a region? Where are we going given current trends? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

The questions are pedestrian. The video was symbolic of the effort to wrap it all into a nice little box, rather than think outside the box. Questions can be reframed. Why is “growth” the key metric, especially when there is so little of it (except outward)? How do we want to define the region? Who is the “we”? Is there a “we” or are some routinely left out? How can a region without any governance institutions or powers get anywhere, except where major corporations and regional economic forces take it? What can the federal government and state governments do to facilitate interstate collaboration in the region? What can the region do to move the Creation Museum to a state outside the region that thinks that “the stupid is a great way to build a future”? How do our “assets” in fact fail? E.g., stadiums, the river, the I-75 bridge-never-to-be-replaced-in-our-lifetime, the airport, casinos. Or, what can a metropolitan region embedded centrally in a larger region experiencing long-term depression do?